The fprint project aims to plug a gap in the Linux desktop: support for consumer fingerprint reader devices.

Previously, Linux support for such devices has been scattered amongst different projects (many incomplete) and inconsistent in that application developers would have to implement support for each type of fingerprint reader separately. For more information on where we came from, see ?/Project history.

We're trying to change that by providing a central system to support all the fingerprint readers we can get our hands on. The software is open source and in the long term we're shooting for adoption by distributions, integration into common desktop environments, etc.

Projects

libfprint

libfprint is the centre of our efforts. libfprint is the component which does the dirty work of talking to fingerprint reading devices, and processing fingerprint data.

If you're a user, you probably aren't interested in libfprint, instead you want to find some software which uses libfprint (see the integration project).

If you're an application developer looking to add support for some kind of fingerprinting to your software, libfprint is exactly what you are looking for. It provides a simple API for you to enroll fingerprints and then identify users later on.